Exfoliation Countdown

One of the street retreat’s co-leaders—I’m talking here about the street retreat in New York City that I did in fact attend last September—said the retreat begins the moment we sign up for it (and someone else or other said it never ends, in that it reverberates forever). At the time I made these notes, I was thinking that at least the former was true, based on the fact that as soon as I decided to do the retreat, six months beforehand, I began worrying about where to leave my suitcase. (I now think the latter is probably true, as well, though it hasn’t quite been forever yet.)

At first I thought I would just fly to NYC overnight and then embark, exhausted, on the retreat, but then I decided that was stupid and that the best thing one can have prior to four lousy nights of sleep is a good night of sleep, so I booked a room at Leo House for the night before the retreat, plus the four nights after.

The obvious place to leave my suitcase between stays at Leo House was at Leo House, but they firmly declined this opportunity. I considered mailing the entire thing to myself at UPS, or sending myself a box with just the essentials, or just doing without. Some people do not have fresh clothes to change into. Some people do not have a toothbrush or floss. I could pretend to be one of them. (Even the most unfortunate indigent, of course, has several clean, folded handkerchiefs placed strategically about her person, as I planned to have.) But then Lucy, my NYC associate, said she had no intention of going to a Broadway show (after the retreat) with someone who appeared to be homeless, so then I considered leaving my suitcase at a place called Schwartz Travel in NYC.

In the end, it was not settled until a week or so before the retreat began. One of the co-leaders said she knew someone in Manhattan who could keep our stuff. Right around then is when I was diagnosed with mild arthritis in both knees, on the same day that Hammett was diagnosed with a  heart murmur. However, I had been faithfully doing the exercises prescribed by my chiropractor, and my knees were detectably starting to feel better. (The key exercises are to stretch the IT bands and quads, using a lacrosse ball and a foam roller. This was excruciatingly painful at first, but after a couple of weeks or so, was less so, and in some spots it even began to feel painful in a pleasant sort of way.)

Right after my final shower before the retreat—five days prior—I had to force myself not to start counting the minutes until I could exfoliate again. The next day was my final shift at work. The morning after that, I was lying in bed semi-awake when the pager went off. Fortunately, I had been in bed for 12 hours and it was a bit less than an hour before the next chaplain was due to start. Since we have a one-hour response time outside of normal work hours, whatever it was was technically the next chaplain’s thing to respond to, but it turned out it was a dying baby, so I leaped out of bed and made it to the hospital 21 minutes after the pager had gone off.

This was my first time doing an emergency baptism since the miracle baby, and this time I went ahead and unabashedly prayed for a miracle. I don’t have to align with what seems biologically possible. The room was full of doctors and nurses who were working as hard as they could in that realm. I am the chaplain. I am in charge of invoking the sacred and the mysterious, and so I did. (Or if that is a bit too pompous, let’s say that the chaplain has the luxury of referring to these things.) The baby’s mother was weeping, and so was I, at the sight of the baby with her eyes closed, with a bit of blood around her mouth. She just looked so little and so vulnerable.

I went on to say, to God, that sometimes we get the exact opposite of what we want, and that if we get what we think we cannot stand, what we think will break us, we need God to remind us that this is not so. Our hearts are large enough to contain whatever we are given to bear. If the unthinkable happens, we can still feel, and we can still love. (I stole those last two phrases directly from one of my fellow students in my chaplaincy program in Santa Fe.) I finished with the Lord’s Prayer.